School reopens amid the dead

Children gathered on tattered mats and small pieces of carpeting spread out under a colourful canopy in earthquake-ravaged Balakot, where no building remains, drawing surprisingly cheerful pictures. Unlike child survivors of other traumatic events, they don’t depict the terrible sights that followed the quake, but images of their homes as they once were – children playing outside the simple bricked structures, wild flowers growing in gardens, goats grazing on green areas. In Balakot, a town of 300,000 close to the epicentre of the quake, at least 20,000 people are thought to have died. The total known death toll from the regional disaster stood at 53,000 on Wednesday, as the United Nations appealed for more resources to assist the victims at a donor meeting in Geneva. Over 40,000 buildings in the town have been flattened – today all that is visible is a vast sea of rubble that has proved impossible to clear. But the government primary school in the town is the first school in the quake-affected region to open its doors to pupils once more. Indeed, across most of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Pakistan-administered Kashmir, schools remain closed, even where buildings exist, because of the aftershocks and the potential risks they present. Volunteers working in the Balakot area have helped to motivate and support surviving teachers to set up a semblance of a school, so that, as teacher Azra says, "the children have something to do and can get on with their lives, rather than just hanging about the camps or digging through piles of relief goods." Only a few are available to teach at all. Like the thousands of children who died in the quake, their teachers also perished as the walls and roofs of school buildings caved in. The rudimentary school that has emerged from the destruction has no facilities, and teachers improvise as they go along. Crouched on the floor, all the tables and chairs of the school having vanished under the debris, the children use colour pencils and notebooks handed out by volunteers to draw pictures, talk to each other about their experiences and compare clothes. Many wear ill-fitting sweaters or jackets retrieved from the relief items distributed in the area. But while the surviving children chant their lessons, around them still lie the bodies of thousands of dead, still interned under the collapsed town. "We really felt it was vital that the children get back into some kind of routine. We have been collecting supplies to start off this school, and will try and do the same in other areas," Fahim Ahmed, a volunteer from the southern Pakistani city of Karachi, said. Along with the school, a few other signs of life are also visible in Balakot, 18 days after the earthquake struck. Makeshift shops selling the few items available have opened. Soap and candles seem to be in demand, and stocks run out quickly. A few vendors sell fruit from open carts, and two women haggle with one over the price of the rotten apples he is selling. Rebuilding the town and hundreds of other communities will take decades. President General Pervez Musharraf estimates US $5 billion will be needed for reconstruction. And the pretty pictures of homes, pets, siblings and parents the children draw are likely to exist only in their memories for a long time to come.